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ple with much of their money in investments that pay interest.
• "The low-interest rate environment has been brutal," says Catherine Collinson, president of the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies. She points out that $500,000 in savings would yield $25,000 a year at an interest rate of 5 percent, just $2,500 at 0.5 percent.
• The crisis also frightened many away from the stock market. Stocks can be riskier than other investments, but they yield more long term. Many investors have shunned stocks while the world's stock markets have soared. In the United States, the Dow Jones industrial average has risen nearly 150 percent since March 2009. Japan's Nikkei index is up 56 percent just this year.
• The past five years have been so tumultuous that some people have been reluctant to invest at all.
• Olivia Mitchell, who studies retirement at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, says her grown daughters rebuffed her when she urged them to save more for retirement. Stocks, they said, are too risky. And bonds don't yield enough interest to be worth the bother.
• THE ASIA CHALLENGE
• In Asia, workers are facing a different retirement worry, a byproduct of their astonishing economic growth.
• Traditionally, Chinese and Koreans could expect their grown children to care for them as they aged. But newly prosperous young people increasingly want to live on their own. They also are more likely to move to distant cities to take jobs, leaving parents behind. Countries like China and South Korea are at an "awkward" stage, says Jackson at the Center for Strategic and International Studies: The old ways are vanishing, but new systems of caring for the aged aren't yet in place.
• Yoo Tae-we, 47, a South Korean manager at a trading company that imports semiconductor components, doesn't expect his son to support him as he and his siblings did their parents. "We have to prepare for our own futures rather than depending on our children," he says.
• South Korean public pensions pay an average of just $744 a month. South Korea has the rich world's highest poverty rate for the elderly. It has one of the world's highest suicide rates for the aged, too.
• China, too, will struggle to finance retirement. China pays generous pensions to civil servants and to urban workers who toiled in inefficient state-owned factories. These workers can retire early with full benefits - at 60 for men and 50 or 55 for women, depending on their job. Their pensions will prove to be a burden as China ages and each retiree is supported by contributions from fewer workers. The elderly

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